Today would have been my father's 90th birthday. I miss him very much.

And, because he was always more interested in giving presents than in receiving them, he seems to have sent me a gift from the great beyond. The camellia tree outside the kitchen door, in the midst of the bitter winds and the cold, has produced one early bloom. It emerged on the tree and then blew down to land at my feet.

"Ah," my friend Fiona says. "It must be camillia paulus paulus." Because my father's name was Paul. 

This house is enchanted.